Telephone company service technicians are dispatched to customer sites for a variety of reasons. For instance, technicians may be dispatched because a new service connection may need to be established, the cause of a power outage may need to be isolated, or a communications line may need to be located.
Conventionally, telephone company service technicians are dispatched to a customer site to perform the repair or service as indicated by a work order. When a technician completes this work, the technician calls for instructions as to the next task. A dispatcher then provides the service technician with the next work order, which specifies a customer location and the service required. A dispatcher may be a person or a computer system. An important goal of the dispatching process is to provide quality customer service.
Quality customer service requires a balancing of response times and priorities. Thus technicians need to be dispatched such that they are responsive to customer needs in a timely fashion. Additionally, the dispatch must allow for flexibility, so that a technician can be dispatched to high priority repair events.
One problem encountered with conventional dispatching processes is that the resulting dispatched work order can cause technicians to waste time driving. For example, a technician may first work at a site on Smith Road, then be dispatched to Jones Street, and subsequently dispatched to a different customer site on Smith Road. That technician's time would be more efficiently utilized by dispatching the technician to the two Smith Road sites just before or just after addressing the Jones Street work order. The additional driving time incurred by the technician is time that could have been used in servicing other customers. Thus a resource (i.e., a technician's time) is wasted and the resolution of a customer site telephone problem or service issue is unnecessarily delayed.
Automated systems for dispatching technicians have been developed by various companies. For example, some conventional systems provide technicians with work orders for customer sites that are within the vicinity of each other. Such conventional systems accept work order requests from technicians in the field. The system then looks at all of the pending work orders. From the locations of pending work orders and the current location of the technician, the system determines which customer site is closest to the technician's current locale. The system makes this determination using locational data, based upon latitude and longitude coordinates, to produce the tightest possible dispatch for the technician.
Common problems encountered, though, include instances in which latitude and longitude locational information is unavailable for the work site in question (e.g., a new sub-division), and instances in which the address of the work site is erroneous. In such cases, no latitude and longitude location information would be discovered within a commercial database.
In a conventional method, a computer system (such as LocateIt, which is distributed by Telcordia Technologies) accesses a commercial database that contains location information, such as latitude and longitude coordinates, for many businesses and residences. An example of such a commercial data base is one provided by Geographical Data Technology and known as the GDT database.
Using such a conventional method, a conventional automatic dispatching system queries the LocateIt system whenever latitude and longitude information is needed to identify a customer location. LocateIt, in turn, queries the geographical database.
LocateIt subsequently returns to the system the requested locational information for the customer site in question.
Correct location information using this conventional system is obtained in only 68% of the queries. Thus, using conventional techniques, a technician is still very likely to have unnecessary drive times. A correct location determination rate above 90% is desirable.
One method to increase the likelihood that correct location information would be found requires personnel to drive to customer sites, determine the site latitude and longitude information via a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver, and then log this location information. Although such a back up method produces accurate information regarding customer locations, driving to each customer site is a very time consuming, and thus costly, process.
What is needed are methods and systems that overcome the shortcomings of conventional systems. Such methods and systems should provide additional advantages, including cost effectiveness and ease of implementation.